ExView: A Real-time Collaboration Environment for Multi-ship Experiments

New challenges in the area of experimental logistics, data visualization and data fusion are encountered in oceanographic research when the need to keep track of the location of multiple ships, moorings, gliders, drifters, and other platforms is combined with assimilating supporting data gathered off the Internet and inserted into the experimental framework. Showing that this can be done well is a start towards our being able to think of scientific expeditions on research vessels as deployable ocean observatories. Researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution recently collaborated with the Rutgers University Coastal Ocean Observing Lab (COOL) and other members of the Shallow Water '06 experiment (sponsored by the US Office of Naval Research) in the creation of a new software tool called ExView. This Experiment Viewer software is a web-based application that runs on ships and on shore. It enables coordinated, real-time collaboration between researchers employing a number of different research platforms involved in a large-scale experiment. During the SW06 experiment, logistics information and scientific reports associated with twenty-five Principal Investigators, six ships, eight gliders, three REMUS class AUVs, sixty-two moorings, two aircraft, and four drifting moorings were all made available to researchers in near-real-time over a three month time-period during the summer of 2006.